April 2017

Archaeologists

Claire spoke about the ancient cesspit she
uncovered in Oxfordshire, buried under
many other middens. She peeled back layers
of history, one at a time, as though
they were thin, onion-skin Bible-pages.
She pierced the reek of a nineteen-fifties
sewer, broke the chapel-like bricks of a
Victorian outhouse, scooped hardened shards
of Tudor tableware from white pig-bones.
Eventually, four metres down, she found
a wet, perfectly smooth, plug of pale clay,
roughly the size of a street-bound drain-grate.
Crow's feet closed, clutching her eyes. She said, "It
was insipid, a sick yellow against
the dried, red ground. My ex-partner tapped it
with the blade of his shovel. When he flipped
it over, it trailed limp blades of grass, still
green and fresh-looking, anaerobically
preserved. Underneath, the shit welled up, brown
and noxious - a smell left over from the
twelfth century. We all had to clear out
and that was hard because we were so deep
that everything had to be lowered down
with a winch and pulley. It was several
days before we could breathe." She smiles, eyes bright
and blue beneath her close-cropped white hair. "It
was amazing; wonderful and awful
at the same time. Nothing stays lost. It's all
dug up again." I stayed still, stared at my
hands, and thought about God. Everything foul,
every denial we forge about our
natures seeps through, in the end. It's all there,
waiting to educate us, alive (if
fraught), even in a stark absence of air.